EBSCO - I hate it - Purple Penguin (3/03/2003 12:43:27 AM)

According to the old Admiral from Ben Hur, it is good to hate - for hate will keep you alive (or something like that). It has only taken one week after returning to uni to discover something that I really hate... EBSCO EBSCO is an electronic resource that one uses to retrieve electronic versions of journal articles - ie at .PDF or full text .HTML files. It is the same sort of thing as Infotrac, ProCite or any of the other e-journal services that The University of Queensland Library subscribes to. It is similar in the sense that one (in theory) can use it to search for and download electronic journal articles. However, this similarity and potential utility is marred by absolute ineptitude of design and by total uselessness, if you are after a .PDF version of a journal article, that is. Our very good (and seemingly competent) friends at Infotrac and ProCite have developed a system where you can select the various retrieval options for your desired articles and download with a minimum of fuss. One can select the .PDF version of an article, and by right-clicking and selecting 'Save Target As' set a large file to download in the background while searching for a new article. This is perfect for the majority of home users with a 33.6 or 56K dial-up connection. The retards at EBSCO, however, have not incorporated this useful feature. Instead, one must wait until the entire .PDF file is fully loaded into the browser's Acrobat Viewer and then save the file from the viewer. This presents a bit of the problem when you are after half a dozen or so articles that are each close to 1MB in size. EBSCO. I loath it. I despise it. It has only taken one afternoon of irritation to discover that this is possibly the most useless system ever devised for retrieving electronic journals. Penguin rating: 1 poofteenth (if that) of a turnip. Read more (2)

Windows XP - a_greatchic (27/07/2002 9:32:38 PM)

I have been using XP since about october 2001.. I thought it was da shit, but lately i have been freezing up everytime i have used photoshop, flash, even dreamweaver likes to shut down and freeze my computer. It seems i have massive hardware conflicts with XP, and USB ports. I seems that my mouse - which is a "Microsoft Optical Intellimouse" yeh you got it, a microsoft product, another product that loves to takeover your system... being due to it being a USB connecting mouse - it likes to interfere with everything, and it is driving me nuts! Of course the sad part is i cannot go back to the ordinary mouse, so i battle on with unconclusive answers to how i go about fixing this. I have unistalled the mouse software, dis connected the webcams and still i seem to get shafted everytime i use certain programs.. Dont bother with web cams, you will only have to re-boot until you can take it no more.. i find myself racing against time - for freezing computers dont warn you, and i have been silly enough to forget to save my work! yeh you got it i am the repeatist, you think i'd be good at what i do by now lol.. but hey we cant have it all. I must re-try reformatting again - it was only 2 weeks ago i did it - but i have declared was on my hardware! Or else Win 2000 is goin back on... in which was running perfectly when i decided i must have XP. Lesson: don't fix what aint broke! Read more (2)

NoteTab - Porcupine (4/06/2002 10:04:11 PM)

NoteTab is a text editor that doesn't really do much, but does enough to make it one of my most used software tools. As many people know, I am pretty hard core when it comes to programming. That is if Hardcore = I don't like making it easy for myself. I don't like using GUI environments that take up enourmous gobs of drive space and RAM, and then force you to indent and capitalise the way they want you to. And damn it, if you can't remember the commands, properties/methods and don't like looking through manuals then what the hell are you doing programming? Just you go be a nice little user coz that's all God equipped your brain for anyways. There's no shame in being a user. Honest. I also build web pages totally from NoteTab. It is ideal for this as it doesn't get in the way and offers some help in the form of highlighting and code samples. You can view your code in your web browser with a tap of a function key - should you wish. This whole site, including ASP code was created and edited in NoteTab. NoteTab holds multiple text documents open at once. It can open enormous files (great for viewing data sets). Oh, and NoteTab does regular expressions for search & replace which is a huge joy to my world. The software is inexpensive shareware, so I highly recommend that all you cheap bastards go out and register. God bless Eric Fookes. Read more (2)

Throw Away ASP ASAP - Adam (27/04/2002 9:51:07 PM)

The .NET framework and Visual Studio.NET released earlier this year by Microsoft is a direct competitor to Java. I also believe however, it is a direct competitor to a great many other technologies including ASP, VBA, COM / ActiveX, x86 CPU's, and C/C++ to name just a few. In this first mini-article, I will briefly compare ASP and ASP.NET. Active Server Pages was of course created to minimize the need for client software, and do server side processing of HTML files. This allows the developer to dynamicly change the content of web pages. In my opinion, the two key factors of success for such a technology is speed, and developer productivity. In both these areas, ASP falls quite short of the .NET Framework / ASP.NET technologies. In traditional ASP, your server-side script is interpreted. Each time the page is requested by a client, the server must read and process the server-side scripts that exist within the ASP page. If you need to do anything processor-intensive or complicated, it usually must be done with an external COM/ActiveX component, probably written in either VB or C/C++. It is overly complicated for the average developer to plug in an external component, not to mention the security risks involved with exposing C/C++ components on IIS. Compare this to the ASP.NET model, where code is first compiled to MSIL (Intermediate Language), and the first time the page is requested, the MSIL is compiled into machine code. It has been shown that the performance of most ASP.NET applications is significantly faster than their ASP counterparts. As for developer productivity, being able to use virtually any .NET component as part of your web application makes things look bad for ASP. The hassles with replacing ActiveX components in ASP make deploying changes a nightmare. ASP has no component model, encourages spaghetti code practices by discouraging clean separation between code and presentation layers, and most importantly lacks a serious debuging framework outside of Response.Write. Generally, once a developer is familiar with ASP.NET, I think its safe to say productivity comparisons would show that it is not even worth comparing the two. In my opinion, throw away ASP ASAP.

NEWS.ASP: Security stage#1 implemented - Porcupine (17/04/2002 9:46:23 AM)

Security levels now implemented, to a degree. You have various admin functionality depending upon your security level. 10 is full dangerous and unnecessary access, 1 is article only. Not totally thought out or complete but there you go.

NEWS.ASP: Bad bug begone! - Porcupine (13/04/2002 6:36:14 PM)

A bug that made an extra article containing only a single line should now never ever happen again. Mind you, it should never have happened in the first place, but this time I think I found what made it happen. Hmph. Seems I didn't quite catch it the first time. But I really squashed that mother the second time.

NEWS.ASP: Sections now active - Porcupine (13/04/2002 6:15:02 PM)

You can now create sections, and if you no longer want a section to be displayed, simply change the order to 0.

NEWS.ASP: Links now active - Porcupine (13/04/2002 12:43:48 PM)

You can now add and delete links! How uber is this site?!

Adam creates his first *real* expression parser - Adam (13/04/2002 9:49:58 AM)

In breaking news today, adam has finally decided that the universities teach compilers & languages well. He created his first recursive decent parser and created his very first parse tree in C#. Unfortunately however, this does not impress anyone, espcially since the parser does not handle precedence yet.

NEWS.ASP: Delete article now active - Porcupine (13/04/2002 8:42:21 AM)

But you have to have an admin password to use it of course. And you can only get that by ... well, if you have it you know how you got it, if you don't have it, you won't get it!

NEWS.ASP: Add new article now active - Porcupine (13/04/2002 7:57:47 AM)

In a stunning display of programming prowess, the add new article function was enabled!